5 sept 2026

Moudon, A.V. (1997) ‘Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Urban Morphology, 1, pp. 3–10.


Moudon establishes urban morphology as an interdisciplinary study of the city through form, resolution and time. Her decisive move is to treat buildings, plots, streets and open spaces not as inert components but as interdependent organisms whose uses, substitutions and transformations register social and economic forces. The article brings the Conzenian, Muratorian and Versailles traditions into a common field, showing how geography, architecture and planning can share a morphological grammar without collapsing their disciplinary differences. Methodologically, it works through nested scales—from parcel/building to street/block, city and region—and through historical transformation rather than static description. The notion of urban morphogenesis is therefore more precise than morphology alone: form becomes a record of continuous becoming. Moudon also anticipates the extension of classical morphological analysis through parcel-based GIS, thereby linking painstaking historical reconstruction to metropolitan-scale computation. The wider bridge is to an epistemology of urban form in which material configuration is both evidence and historical process.